THE BOTTOM OF THINGS

I only wish I had the time ability to tell you of the grand discoveries the Lord has made to me of Himself this summer. Not emotional discoveries; I never felt myself further from emotion; but conviction, consciousness, reality, intuition, an inward sense that goes deeper than belief, that is in fact knowledge. It seems to me as if all my life before this I had been knowing about God, but now have come to a place of knowing Him Himself, a personal acquaintance as it were. But I cannot tell it. It is like a getting home somehow. It is as if I had got at last to the bottom of things, to the place of foundations, where I know by a sense beyond all knowledge how God is really the beginning and the end of everything; the King in His own universe; the one only omnipotent Creator! I have never really known an omnipotent God before. He has been a bounded, limited, helpless God, and therefore He could not be trusted utterly and alone; He needed helps to His omnipotence to make it real, or availing. But now I see that “of Him, and to Him, and through Him are all things,” and my soul rests with an absolute settlement in His arms of omnipotence. “Even the devils are subject unto Him.” Oh beloved, it is such a comfort to get down to the very foundations of things, past the place where precipices can be feared, or doubts be dreaded. To know God is to have every question forever answered, every longing stilled! But I cannot write it; I must wait until we meet and can talk it all over, if the Lord permits. —To Anna, 1315 Filbert St., Philadelphia, Pa., October 17, 1879